


36 Views of the Weighted Blanket

by malaxis



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Canon-typical language, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, content warning for panic-attack adjacent scenery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-22
Updated: 2019-09-22
Packaged: 2020-10-25 16:35:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,138
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20727347
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/malaxis/pseuds/malaxis
Summary: Indrid is wracked with debilitating visions, but Duck is there to share his home, his warmth, and his weighted blanket.This had been plucked out of the Amnesty timeline. When does this take place? Who knows, presumably before the end of the world. Why is Indrid at Duck's apartment? Your guess is as good as mine, folks. Are there any spoilers for any recent episodes? Absolutely not. Enjoy!





	36 Views of the Weighted Blanket

**Author's Note:**

> me: is this too soft? is this too ooc?  
also me: who the fUCK CARES IVE ALREADY REWRITTEN IT LIKE TWICE
> 
> this was sort of a prompt for myself that i made a tumblr post about and then ohducknewton "goaded" me into writing (in the tags...didnt even direct it at me). anyway i wrote it and it took way too long and i hope yall like it.
> 
> Apologies for any formatting errors, this has been done entirely from my phone.

Visions stacked up in his mind like bricks, layers and layers falling down before him, crushing and cracking the ones beneath them into chunks, then pebbles, then dust. His hand was cramping under the effort to get them all down before they blew away on the wind. Duck was talking, quiet and soothing, somewhere beyond his immediate perception, yet. It was cacophony. All inscrutable sounds. Mouth noises. Lead scratching. Paper tearing, tearing, tearing. The pencil cracked in his grip and he let it fall, fingers coming up to tangle into his already messy hair. He couldn’t breathe, couldn’t make himself stop _seeing_—

And then something heavy settled over his shoulders. Not the writhing guilt and anxiety of his visions; something _real_.Tangible. Comforting.

And Duck’s words started processing in his mind again. Calm, directive, concerned.

Indrid’s fingers found the edges of the blanket Duck had draped over his shoulders, and gripped _tight_. It wasn’t as thick as a comforter, but somehow heavier than one. The weight of it dropped some of the tension in his shoulders.

“Can you breathe with me, Indrid?” Duck asked, sitting directly in front of him and doing his best to get Indrid to make eye contact. 

Indrid pulled his focus from off in the distance and out in the future, to Duck’s face. His eyebrows were pulled up in concern, and he was breathing audibly through his nose, slow and measured. Quite the contrast to Indrid’s own breathing, quick and ragged and wheezy. He swallowed around the dryness of his throat and inhaled shakily, and exhaled the same way, trying to match his breath to Duck’s. He inhaled again, exhaled again, repeated, repeated, and finally stopped shaking when his rhythm matched Duck’s, fingers unclenching from the blanket.

“You good?” Duck asked quietly.

Indrid shook his head.

“Visions gettin’ worse?” He reached for Indrid’s sketchbook. Indrid didn’t stop him, stared down at the last couple of pages as Duck pulled the book in his direction. They looked more like blind contour drawings than sketches, shaky with no reference point and no true outlines. Like they were drawn in an earthquake.

Duck flipped through the most recent pages, pursing his lips as he traced the sketches.

“It’s not that they’re getting worse,” Indrid said, speaking for the first time in what could have been an hour. His voice came out hoarse, and clearing his throat would do nothing for that. “It’s that timelines are splitting rapidly, and all the new visions are...overwhelming."

Duck hummed and got up, moving toward the kitchen. He pulled out a glass from the cupboard and asked, still turned away, “Did you comin’ here change things?”

“Not...not necessarily, Duck.” Indrid wrung his hands in his lap, hidden underneath the blanket. A shiver wracked through his frame. “Things change in an instant all the time, constantly. It’s just...” he trailed off, thinking. Duck walked back over, sat back down on the couch next to Indrid, and held out the glass in front of him, now full of water, presumably from the tap. Indrid reached his hand out from the blanket and took it with a small nod of thanks. “It’s just that abominations are more...unpredictable, I suppose.”

Duck nodded, but the blank look on his face told Indrid that he didn’t really understand. Nor was he going to ask, because he was worried about Indrid’s well-being. Which was sweet, but unnecessary, so Indrid took a great inhale and explained anyway.

“We’re all driven by something when making choices. Logic, passion, maybe past experience. For a lot of us, it’s a combination of many things.” Indrid took a sip of water and set it down on the coffee table. “Abominations are almost completely driven by instinct. This means that any decision that lies on one of them has many branching possibilities, because they will do whatever it takes to survive. Whatever strikes first. Whatever feels right. So that means when an abomination is in the near future, it creates massive fissures in my vision. I am at my...hm. Least helpful. Right before the full moon. If that makes sense.”

Duck nodded solemnly. “Y’know we don’t talk to you just ‘cause of your _usefulness_, right?”

“Logically, yes, I know that.” Indrid sat up and the blanket fell from his shoulders, pooled around his legs and in his lap. “It is nice to hear, though. What kind of blanket is this? It’s much heavier than it looks.” That was probably the smoothest subject change he could get without peeking into this conversation’s future. The thought of actively seeking out visions at this particular moment made his stomach queasy and his eyes hurt.

Duck looked like he wanted to carry the previous thread of conversation, but after a moment he let it go. “ ‘S a weighted blanket. It helps with...” He trailed off. “Well, it’s nice, anyway. Got it a few years back and it’s one of my most prized possessions.”

“I like it,” Indrid murmured. “I think it...helped. With the vision stuff.” He paused briefly, before continuing, louder, “Mind you, it still feels like an entire balloon inflated in my skull, but maybe 75 percent as bad as usual."

Duck huffed in amusement. “The weighted blanket: nature’s aspirin for vision hangover.”

“Oh, vision hangover, that’s very good.”

“Why, what do you call it?”

Indrid pursed his lips. “Being overloaded?”

“That’s bad.”

“Yes, well, no one really has the terminology for this sort of thing, and without anyone to talk to about it, it’s not really a priority to give everything a name, Duck.” Indrid frowned and reached for his abandoned sketchbook, closing it over. Too soon to look at the sketches. His head filled with static at the very notion of it.

Duck nodded once. “Sure, makes sense. I mean, not to me, but to someone out there. Probably.” He glanced at his watch, and then stood up, stretching his arms high above his head and wiggling his fingers. “Alright, I got an early day tomorrow. Ya want the bed, or the couch?”

“I want the blanket,” Indrid responded resolutely.

“Well, since that wasn’t an option, I s’pose you’re gettin’ the bed.”

“_And_ the blanket?” Indrid grinned mischievously up at Duck. “So generous of you.”

Duck chuckled, shook his head, and sighed. “Pick one. We can swap off if y—“

“Blanket.” There was no choice, here. Not for Indrid. “I want the blanket.”

“Fine, but it’s mine tomorrow night. You need more comforters? I think I got another space heater if you want a second one.”

“Yes, please, to both.” He stood up, letting the weighted blanket lie on the couch for the moment. It was like leaving a part of himself behind that he didn’t even know existed. “I can get the blankets if you get the heater.”

Duck smiled warmly up at Indrid. “Sure thing. Be back in a minute.” And he retreated to his room, the telltale sound of a closet door sliding open and totes being moved reaching Indrid’s ears.

For his part, Indrid gave himself permission to take a brief peek into the future—nothing big, or life-changing, just a simple task of finding the extra blankets. It almost didn’t even hurt. The aftershocks of his big vision bonanza were fading, a fact for which he was grateful. He meandered over to the hall closet and opened the door, gaze finding the three extra blankets immediately. He picked them all up at once, gathering the pile into his arms, and shut the door with his foot, finding his way easily back to the couch despite the fact that the blankets obscured half his vision.

Duck re-entered the living room as Indrid was just finishing up with making a blanket nest, and he lifted the small space heater as a sort of acknowledgment that he’d found it.

“Thank you,” Indrid said without looking in Duck’s direction. “I appreciate it.”

“ ‘S no problem. Really.” He set the space heater on the little end table beside the couch, plugging it into the outlet that wasn’t housing the table lamp. With two clicks of the knob, heat began to emanate from it, and Indrid immediately felt warmer.

“I appreciate it all the same.”

Duck dropped his gaze to the floor in something like embarrassment. “Right. Well. You’re welcome, then. Uhh...you already know, anything in the kitchen is fair game...and, uh, if you need me for anything...I’m here.”

Indrid nodded in understanding. He’d already thanked Duck so many times, so he opted instead for, “Sleep well.”

“You, too. ‘Night, Mothman.”

Indrid rolled his eyes at Duck’s back.

-

He didn’t sleep well.

In the darkness, the sounds of living magnified. The walls groaning and settling with the evening. Leo's footsteps next door as he puttered around in the kitchen. The heater whirring on the coffee table, a steady hum beside him. His heart, stuttering in his chest, blood thrumming in his ears, pulse in his fingertips.

He stared up at the ceiling, willing his heart to calm down. He took in a breath--his chest wouldn't hold it--he tried again. Let his stomach do the work of pushing it out his mouth and nose. He repeated the motion, mechanically, counting the seconds of each inhale, of each exhale, until he could reliably get to 5. 

He focused on what he could sense in the present, doing his best to block out the visions that were ever-present, ever-playing across the silver screen of his mind. Duck's even breathing in the next room, a steady metronome to the moon's ascent, rounding out like pancake batter spreading in a buttered pan. The moon's beams lit up the room in a soft glow, reflecting gently on every object they touched, including the rims of Indrid's glasses and the hair that had fallen into his face. He closed his eyes, loosened his clenched fists, and matched his breathing to Duck's, until his brain finally gave him a moment's respite to drift off into a fretful sleep.

Visions were much easier to avoid while awake. Indrid had much less control when he was asleep. While in training, the previous Seer had hammered into Indrid the responsibility to never let any visions bypass him, had told him to simply let them come, in day or in dreams. There was no reason to block them, to avoid them, because it was his responsibility to his people to record every possible future.

He'd never received training to quell the visions while asleep, and he'd never figured it out on his own, either. As soon as he dropped off to sleep they returned with a vengeance, seeping into the cracks of his otherwise normal subconscious, twisting his dreams into a collage of real and not real, visions and fears. Half-conscious, he restlessly turned this way and that, in an attempt to escape every future laid out before him, good and bad, but they were not so easily outrun.

Sometime during the night, when his brain was more awake than his body, Indrid registered arms sliding under his knees and around his shoulders. Being lifted with ease and pulled against a solid yet soft chest. His own shallow breathing, loud and uneven in his ears, was cut through by the creaking of the wood floor, delicately placed footsteps shuffling along the worn surface. Indrid's whole body felt like he had run a marathon, sore and aching from his muscles coiling up with tenseness while he slept. 

He unclenched his fists briefly, joints aching and cold,just to re-clench them into the front of Duck's cotton sleep shirt. A sigh came from close to his forehead and, instead of being deposited onto Duck's bed like he expected, half asleep as he was, Duck clambered onto the bed himself and spent a good 30 seconds in a tedious balancing act before he'd laid down with Indrid beside him, without breaking the hold on his shirt. Indrid sighed as Duck rearranged the bedding so that the weighted blanket, then the comforter, still warm, were pulled over both of them. With relief, Indrid realized that he'd regained some calm, and loosened his hold on Duck's shirt. But didn't release it altogether.

"You okay?" Duck breathed. His right arm was still under Indrid's shoulders, fingers curled around his upper arm.

Indrid nodded the slightest bit. "Better, at least."

No more words passed between them. Indrid spent the next several minutes zoning out as Duck's breathing slowed to a steady rhythm once more.

-

The next moment Indrid registered, it was with surprise to the sun greeting him.

And Duck watching him. His eyes were still puffy from having recently been asleep, and the stress lines that normally appeared above his brow and around his mouth had been smoothed away with a night's rest. His hair was sticking in all directions, upright against his pillow, down toward his forehead, and out into the world at large. With the first white rays of sunlight, he looked...soft. Warm. Like home.

"Good morning?" Indrid hazarded, voice a weaker whisper than he'd attempted.

"Mornin'. How'd you sleep?"

Indrid took a moment to answer. His eyes didn't feel their usual tenderness, like they were constantly bruised. He was drowsy but not exhausted. The pressure-headache that had been plaguing him was now just a dull thrum at the back of his head, much like the visions that had been so overwhelming less than twelve hours ago. His back hurt about the same amount as it always did. And he was so, so comfortably warm.

"Surprisingly well."

"Good." Duck's usual gruffness was nonexistent in his voice this early in the morning. There was something so much softer about him before his day had truly begun. Indrid had only witnessed this side of Duck a couple of times, both happening between a coffee and a work shift. He found that he could get used to it, this secret sliver of Duck that hardly anyone else had ever met.

"Visions still got you?" Duck asked, concern flashing briefly in the deep brown of his eyes.

"Not currently," Indrid admitted. "I'm sure they'll return with a vengeance later, but. For now the future is calm." Except for the part where Duck was going to be late to work if he lay here any longer. "Shouldn't you be getting ready for work?"

Duck broke Indrid's gaze for the first time that morning, in something like embarrassment. Or shyness. "Yeah. I'm goin'." He continued to lay there, arm tucked under his head.

"You're going to be late."

A sigh. "Yeah."

Indrid chuckled. "Something you wanted to say to me?"

Duck hummed with the effort of bringing words to his tongue. "You already know. You're welcome here as long as you need it. That includes the bed." He stared resolutely at the lamp past Indrid's head. "'S all. No big deal. Okay. I gotta get ready."

Indrid reached out at exactly the moment that Duck decided to get up, gripping his shoulder firmly until Duck laid back down from his half-hearted sitting up. He scooted closer and placed his head against Duck's chest, then let his arm drape over Duck's waist, the other trapped between their bodies.

The sigh that escaped Duck's lips was much like the one from the previous night. Resigned to his fate, contented by it as well. He wriggled one arm under Indrid, laid the other over his shoulders, and wrapped Indrid in the most gratifying hug he had ever received. Indrid had never felt more whole than at that moment. He pressed himself closer, glasses going askew as he did so. He didn't adjust them, just stayed fixed where he was and let Duck's heartbeat lull him into a sleepy trance.

"Alright?" Duck murmured.

Indrid nodded against Duck's chest. He let a few moments pass while Duck's warmth seeped into his skin. "You need to go to work."

"Yeah." He made no motion to get up. In fact, his arms tightened the slightest amount around Indrid.

A beat. 

"Duck."

"I'm gettin' up," Duck said. He did not, in fact, get up. Indrid was expecting that, but it amused him all the same. They lay in silence for another minute, both their breaths counting the seconds.

"_Duck_."

"Al_right_." Duck finally pulled away, taking the warmth with him.

Indrid chuckled and allowed himself to doze off while Duck moved around the apartment, getting ready for work at a very leisurely pace for someone whose shift started in five minutes. With his eyes closed, his attention followed Duck by sound rather than sight. Duck went into the adjoining bathroom, closed the door, and came back out a couple minutes later with an electric toothbrush humming in his mouth. It buzzed like a bee as Duck moved about the room, shuffling out of his sleep clothes and into his uniform. The buzz faded as Duck left the room and ran water in the kitchen, for what Indrid assumed was the kettle. Duck walked back into the room just as the toothbrush completed its cycle, and his footsteps led back to the bathroom, where Indrid heard more water splashing.

"Want coffee?" Duck asked as he stepped back into the room. He was combing his hair now, although Indrid would not have been able to say what it was about the sounds coming from his direction that led him to this conclusion.

"No, thank you," he murmured in response.

"It'll be there if you change your mind." He stepped over to the side of the bed to grab his wallet, keys, work radio, sword, and hat, each making a different sound as Duck picked them up.

He stood there for a long moment. Indrid already knew what he was going to say.

"We should probably--"

"Yes," Indrid agreed, without letting him finish. He peeked one eye open. Duck was messing with the brim of his hat in an attempt to busy his hands. "But you're running late. We'll talk about it later." He closed his eye again and burrowed deeper into the bed. His nose was right against Duck's pillow, and he inhaled the scent of Duck's shampoo (nothing special--Head and Shoulders--but he liked it anyway).

Duck didn't move. He spoke again. "It's gonna be a _good_ talk, right?"

An amused huff escaped Indrid's lips. "Go to work, Duck."

"I'm goin'; I'm leavin' now." He spent another seven minutes in the kitchen, fixing himself a coffee and some toast, before he actually left. He called out a goodbye to Indrid, who had already fallen mostly back asleep and did not have it in him to respond.

With the weighted blanket over him, Duck's residual warmth all around him, and a safe place to stay, he fell back into a blissful sleep and dreamed of nothing.

**Author's Note:**

> concrit is welcome and encouraged!
> 
> you can find me on tumblr! my taz blog is @sylffs and my main blog is @malaxis


End file.
